A Dangerous Method
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| Starring |
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| Directed by | David Cronenberg | |
| Produced by | Jeremy Thomas | |
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| Music by | Howard Shore | |
| Distributed by | Lionsgate (United Kingdom) Entertainment One (Canada)
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| Released | Sept 02, 2011 | |
| Runtime | 99 minutes | |
| IMDB Info | 1571222 on IMDb | |
https://www.theweek.co.uk/film/44932/the-english-vice-why-do-we-love-talking-about-spanking website Updated: 2001 |
- Keira Knightley says only England is fixated on "A Dangerous Method's" [1] sadomasochistic scenes
"Why are the English so besotted with spanking", asks Keira Knightley. The actress says she almost turned down the role of mental patient Sabina Spielrein in David Cronenberg’s new film "A Dangerous Method" about the friendship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud.
She feared that scenes in which her character appears topless and tied to a bed while Jung (Michael Fassbender) spanks her behind would be too outrageously explicit, and attract undue attention, she told The Daily Telegraph at the film’s British premiere in London last night.
But Knightley was surprised to discover that, weirdly, the scenes haven’t been mentioned in most countries. In the whole three days the cast were at the Venice Film Festival, they were not mentioned at all and the rest of the world seems to have turned a blind eye to them… except in England.
"In England it’s got mentioned all the time," she said. "I don’t know what that says about us. We obviously like spanking."
But retired psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple who has worked with dominatrix patients during his medical career questions whether The English Vice is actually so English after all.
"Certainly there is a national fascination with the practice," he writes in The Daily Telegraph today, but he says the idea that spanking for sexual pleasure is "as English as cricket and buttered crumpets" is not true if the film itself is anything to go by.
The figure of the public school master "trembling with erotic excitement as he flogs a series of boys", which is supposed to be at the psychological root of a subsequent desire to be flogged, is "more of a cliché than truth".
He also points out that the word 'sadism’ comes not from an Englishman but a Frenchman, de Sade, and 'masochism’ from the Austrian Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
Synopsis
Jung: Tell me about the first time you can remember being beaten by your father.
Spielrein: It's possible...I was four. I'd broken a plate or...yes, and he told me to go into the little room and take my clothes off and then he came in and...spanked me!
[she starts crying]
And then I was so frightened I wet myself...and then he hit me again! And then...
Jung: That first time, how did you feel about what was happening?
[Sabina answers very quietly]
Jung: Would you repeat that? I couldn't quite hear.
Spielrein: I liked it. It excited me!
Jung: And did you continue to like it?
Spielrein: Yes! Yes! Before long...he just had to say to me to go to the little room and I would...I would start to get wet. He would just threaten, it was enough! I'd have to go down and lie down and...and touch myself. He would scold and it would set it off! Any kind of humiliation, I looked for any humiliation! Even here, you...you hit my...my coat with your stick, I had to come back right away. I was so...excited! There's no hope for me. I'm wild and filthy and corrupt. I must never be let out of here.
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The story begins with the arrival of a patient, Sabina Spielrein, at Carl Jung's psychiatric clinic in Zurich, Switzerland. The beautiful and highly intelligent Jewish Russian woman suffers from hysteric attacks. Jung applies a new method, psychoanalysis, as developed by his Austrian colleague and mentor Sigmund Freud. He has soon identified her problem: guilt over masochistic sexual fantasies engendered by her sadistic father's corporal punishments during childhood. In the course of the following therapy sessions, Spielrein is soon on the road to recovery. She and Jung begin a secret love affair.
The title refers to Jung's innovative "talking cure", the earliest form of psychoanalysis, in which Jung encourages Sabina to recall her feelings as a child when her father spanked her.
Spanking references and scenes
Soon after Spielrein (played by Keira Knightley) becomes the patient of Jung (Michael Fassbender), the two go on a walk in the park. There, Spielrein becomes very uneasy when Jung beats the dust off her coat with a walking stick. Later she admits to him that she is fascinated and sexually aroused by any smallest thing to do with punishment and humiliation. When Jung asks his patient about her earliest memories of the beatings she received as a four-year-old from her father, she tells him: "It excited me!"
Later, after the two become lovers, Spielrein, now a much more self-confident person and at peace with her kink, tells Jung that she wants their love to be harsh, not too tender: "With me I want you to be ferocious. I want you to punish me." In one scene that follows, Jung spanks Spielrein with his hand (delivering five hard smacks) while she bends over a couch. In another, later scene, she is dressed in her undergarments and kneeling on a bed with her wrists bound while he whips her six times with a folded leather belt. She watches herself in this scene in the mirror cabinet.
Keira Knightley has starred previously in films such as Bend It Like Beckham and the popular Pirates of the Caribbean series.
True story vs. film
The film is based on a true event from 1904-1909. Sabina Spielrein was born in 1885, so she was 19 years old in 1904. Details of her affair with Jung (born 1875, 10 years her senior), which ended abruptly in 1909, are preserved through the correspondence between Jung and Freud, and Spielrein's letters and diaries. Spielrein graduated in 1911 and became one of the world's first female psychoanalysts. In 1942 she was killed in Rostow in the holocaust, being a Jew, together with her daughters Renata, 29, and Eva, 16. The story of Sabina Spielrein's life was presented to the public in the documentary Ich hieß Sabina Spielrein by Elisabeth Márton, 2002.
In the film, the story is condensed and moved forward to the year 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I.
A Dangerous Method is a 2011 historical film directed by David Cronenberg and starring Keira Knightley, Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, and Vincent Cassel. The screenplay was adapted by writer Christopher Hampton from his 2002 stage play The Talking Cure, which was based on the 1993 non-fiction book by John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein.
Set on the eve of World War I, A Dangerous Method describes the turbulent relationships between Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology; Sigmund Freud, founder of the discipline of psychoanalysis; and Sabina Spielrein, initially a patient of Jung and later a physician and one of the first female psychoanalysts.
A co-production between British, Canadian and German production companies, the film marks the third consecutive collaboration between Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen (after A History of Violence and Eastern Promises). This is also the third Cronenberg film made with British film producer Jeremy Thomas, after completing together the William S. Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch and the J. G. Ballard adaptation Crash. Filming took place between May and July 2010 in Cologne on a soundstage, with exterior shots filmed in Vienna.
Plot
In August 1904, Sabina Spielrein arrives at the Burghölzli, the pre-eminent psychiatric hospital in Zürich Switzerland, suffering from hysteria and begins a new course of treatment with the young Swiss doctor Carl Jung. He uses word association and dream interpretation as part of his approach to psychoanalysis, and finds that Spielrein's condition was triggered by the humiliation and sexual arousal she felt as a child when her father spanked her naked.
Jung and chief of medicine Eugen Bleuler recognize Spielrein's intelligence and energy, and allow her to assist them in their experiments. She measures the physical reactions of subjects during word association, to provide empirical data as a scientific basis for psychoanalysis. She soon learns that much of this new science is founded on the doctors' observations of themselves, each other, and their families, not just their patients. The doctors correspond at length before they meet, and begin sharing their dreams and analyzing each other, and Freud himself soon adopts Jung as his heir and agent.
Jung finds in Spielrein a kindred spirit, and their attraction deepens due to transference. Jung resists the idea of cheating on his wife, Emma Jung and breaking the taboo of sex with a patient, but his resolve is weakened by the wild and unrepentant confidences of his new patient Otto Gross, a brilliant, philandering, unstable psychoanalyst. Gross decries monogamy in general and suggests that resistance to transference is symptomatic of the repression of normal, healthy sexual impulses, exhorting Jung to indulge himself with abandon.
Jung finally begins an affair with Spielrein, including rudimentary bondage and spanking. Things become even more tangled as he becomes her advisor to her dissertation; he publishes not only his studies of her as a patient but eventually her treatise as well. Spielrein wants to conceive a child with Jung, but he refuses. After his attempt to confine their relationship again to doctor and patient, she appeals to Freud for his professional help, and forces Jung to tell Freud the truth about their relationship, reminding him that she could have publicly damaged him but did not want to.
Jung and Freud journey to America. However, cracks appear in their friendship as they begin to disagree more frequently on matters of psychoanalysis. Jung and Spielrein meet to work on her dissertation in Switzerland, and begin their sexual relationship once more. However, after Jung refuses to leave his wife for her, Spielrein decides to go to Vienna. She meets Freud, and says that although she sides with him, she believes he and Jung need to reconcile for psychoanalysis to continue to develop.
Following Freud's collapse at an academic conference, he and Jung continue correspondence via letters. They decide to end their relationship after increasing hostilities and accusations regarding the differences in their conceptualization of psychoanalysis. Spielrein marries a Russian doctor and, while pregnant, visits Jung and his wife. They discuss psychoanalysis and Jung's new mistress. Jung confides that his love for Spielrein made him a better person.
The film's footnote reveals the eventual fates of the four analysts. Gross starved to death in Berlin in 1920. Freud died of cancer in London in 1939 after being driven out of Vienna by the Nazis. Spielrein trained a number of analysts in the Soviet Union, before she, along with her two daughters, were shot by the Nazis in 1942. Jung emerged from a nervous breakdown to become the world's leading psychologist before dying in 1961.
Cast
- Keira Knightley]] as Sabina Spielrein
- Michael Fassbender]] as Carl Jung
- Viggo Mortensen]] as Sigmund Freud
- Vincent Cassel]] as Otto Gross
- Sarah Gadon]] as Emma Jung
- André Hennicke]] as Eugen Bleuler
- Arndt Schwering-Sohnrey as Sándor Ferenczi
Spanking references and scenes
- Spielrein: When you make love to your wife, how is it? Describe it to me.
- Jung: When you live in the same room with someone, it becomes habit. You know, it's...it's very tender.
- Spielrein: And this is another thing. Another thing in another country. With me I want you to be ferocious. I want you to punish me. ”
Soon after Spielrein (played by Keira Knightley) becomes the patient of Jung (Michael Fassbender), the two go on a walk in the park. There, Spielrein becomes very uneasy when Jung beats the dust off her coat with a walking stick. Later she admits to him that she is fascinated and sexually aroused by any smallest thing to do with punishment and humiliation. When Jung asks his patient about her earliest memories of the beatings she received as a four-year-old from her father, she tells him: "It excited me!"
Later, after the two become lovers, Spielrein, now a much more self-confident person and at peace with her kink, tells Jung that she wants their love to be harsh, not too tender: "With me I want you to be ferocious. I want you to punish me." In one scene that follows, Jung spanks Spielrein with his hand (delivering five hard smacks) while she bends over a couch. In another, later scene, she is dressed in her undergarments and kneeling on a bed with her wrists bound while he whips her six times with a folded leather belt. She watches herself in this scene in the mirror cabinet.
Keira Knightley has starred previously in films such as Bend It Like Beckham and the popular Pirates of the Caribbean series.
Production
Hampton's earliest version of the screenplay, dating back to the 1990s, was written for Julia Roberts in the role of Sabina Spielrein, but the film was never realized. Hampton re-wrote the screenplay for the stage, before producer Jeremy Thomas acquired the rights for both the earlier script and the stage version.
The film was produced by Britain's Recorded Picture Company, with Germany's Lago Film and Canada's Prospero Film acting as co-producers. Additional funding was provided by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, MFG Baden-Württemberg, Filmstiftung NRW, the German Federal Film Board and Film Fund, Ontario Media Development Corp and Millbrook Pictures.
Christoph Waltz was initially cast as Sigmund Freud, but was replaced by Viggo Mortensen due to a scheduling conflict. Christian Bale had been in talks to play Carl Jung, but he too had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts.
Filming began on 26 May and ended on 24 July 2010. Exteriors were shot in Vienna and interiors were filmed on a soundstage in Cologne, Germany. Viennese locations included the Café Sperl, Sigmund Freud Museum and the Schloss Belvedere (Vienna) Lake Constance stood in for Lake Zurich.
A noted feature of the film is the extensive use in the musical score of leitmotifs from Wagner's third Ring opera Siegfried, mostly in piano transcription. In fact the composer Howard Shore has said that the structure of the film is based on the structure of the Siegfried opera.
Release
Universal Pictures released the film in German-speaking territories, while Lions Gate Entertainment took rights to the United Kingdom and Sony Pictures Classics distributed the film in the United States. The film debuted at the Venice Film Festival in Italy on 2 September 2011.
Reception
On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 78% approval rating, based on 187 reviews with an average rating of 6.85/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "A provocative historical fiction about the early days of psychoanalysis, A Dangerous Method is buoyed by terrific performances by Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Viggo Mortensen."
Louise Keller reports from Urban Cinephile, "The best scenes are those between Mortensen and Fassbender...the tension between the two men mounts as their views conflict: Freud insists that sex is an underlying factor in every neurosis while Jung, interested in spiritualism and the occult, is disappointed by what he considers to be Freud's 'rigid pragmatism.'"
Andrew O'Hehir's review on Salon (website) notes that on the one hand Freud's "single-minded focus on sexual repression as the source of neurosis led to the creation of psychiatry as a legitimate medical and scientific field—one that was often resistant to change and dominated by authoritarian father figures." On the other hand, Sabina's effect on Jung, and "the discoveries they had made together, both in the office and the bedroom," including the potential in "a creative fusion of opposites—doctor and patient, man and woman, dark and light, Jew and Aryan," led to a falling out between the two men "over a variety of issues, most notably the scientific limits of psychiatric inquiry."
In contrast, Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that, despite the film's exploration of "the way our subconscious works, the way we repress, and suppress, natural urges—the constant battle between the rational and the instinctive, the civilized and the wild", the film "feels distant, and clinical, in ways you wished it did not." In an interview with The Daily Beast's Marlow Stern, Cronenberg himself is quoted as saying that the love scenes between Jung and Spelrein were "quite clinical. These were people who, even when they were having sex, they were observing themselves having sex because they were so interested in their reactions to things."
The film was listed at number 5 on Film Comment magazine's Best Films of 2011 list.
Spanking parody video
A Risque Method (CP-125, Chelsea Pfeiffer Entertainment) is a fetish video in which Mei Mara plays a patient who is spanked by her strict therapist played by Chelsea Pfeiffer.
See also
External links
Review Review A Dangerous Method on Internet Movie Database
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This page may use content from Wikipedia. The original article was at A_Dangerous_Method. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. |
References
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